"Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche" is the personal web log of John V. Fleming, the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English and Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University. It continues in its title and its spirit his one-time newspaper column in The Daily Princetonian. As a general rule a new post is mounted every Wednesday morning (EST).

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Tidewater Trip

"weary with wrongdoing"

I am not quite sure what exactly I anticipated with the word
retirement, but it wasn’t the rather
breathless activity that leaves me once again facing blog morning with the sole
option of a sort of journalistic “Hail, Mary.” I have to fly off to London later today, and there are
various other non-negotiables standing between me and Newark Airport. Perhaps saying I have to go to England is stretching the truth a bit, since my only
goal is a fancy dinner party at my old college in Oxford; but I have arrived at
the point of life at which I tend to seize opportunities lest they never appear again. This means that retirement
is not always less busy than my old professional life, but is often more fun.

Last
week Joan and I took a trip to Richmond, and everything about it was fun. The ostensible purpose of the trip was
my engagement to give a lecture to the Tuckahoe Woman’s Club in their baronial
clubhouse. My topic was “The Language of History and the History of
Language”—or was it vice versa? Anyway the experience was highly
enjoyable at least to the lecturer, though it turned out to be only one of
several pleasurable episodes of our three-day visit. For we had the good fortune to be billeted not in a hotel
but with our friends the Moxleys, who seemed determined to prove that southern
hospitality, though proverbial, is far more than a proverb.

One high point was a
leisurely visit to Williamsburg, which included an excellent lunch at the home
of President and Mrs. Reveley on the campus of the College of William and
Mary. As a post-luncheon treat
Mrs. Reveley had arranged for us a private tour of the old campus, conducted by
a highly knowledgeable graduate student in colonial American history. At Princeton (founded in 1746) we like
to think we’re old, but William and Mary is older. Furthermore the old stuff there is both more copious and
more interesting than what we have here.
Old Virginia was run by fox-hunting Anglicans. Princeton was the brainchild of chilblained Dissenters. Such distinctions are not without
spiritual consequence. Of course
later on there was a decisive event, called the Civil War, that pretty well
flattened--literally or fiscally--every institution of higher learning in the south. Wars have consequences too.

I
had been to Williamsburg before, and even had lectured at William and Mary, but
somehow I was unaware of the Muscarelle Museum of Art. We spent the hour before lunch visiting
the museum, which was hosting a knock-out show entitled “Michaelangelo Sacred
and Profane: Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti”. The visiting treasures will have
one more American stop—at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, beginning April 21st.
See them if you can. Most of Michaelangelo’s drawings are
quite famous, and I had seen many of them before, though only in reproduction. Seeing the real things, en masse and intelligently mounted, was
an unanticipated thrill.

The
“Sacred and Profane” bit is the sort of title you revert to when trying to
impose some spurious unity upon a lecture, a show, or an academic course. It meant that some of the drawings were
of religious subjects, and some were not.
There were, for example, a fair number of architectural drawings. I am an architectural illiterate, but
if it’s Michaelangelo you must at least try. The emphatic place in the exhibition had been reserved for a
fine, large Madonna and Child; but I doubt that I am alone in placing the
well-known drawing of Cleopatra at the top of my private list. Shakespeare’s Enobarbus might have been
looking at this drawing when he uttered his judgment on the Egyptian
Queen: “Age cannot wither her nor
custom stale her infinite variety.”
Swinburne, who did gaze upon the drawing during his Italian tour, said
something a little different: “Beautiful always beyond desire
and cruel beyond words; fairer than heaven and more terrible than hell; pale
with pride and weary with wrongdoing.”
You can almost always count on the Victorians. Weary with wrongdoing. What a great idea!

We
now know that Michaelangelo himself probably shared it. Admirers had oooed and aaahed over this
drawing of Cleopatra for more than four centuries when a sharp-eyed expert
noticed (in 1988) that there seemed to be something drawn on its backside. This was by no means easy to discern,
as the obverse of the drawing had been backed with reinforcing paper. Removal of this backing paper,
conducted by conservators with the care of a bomb-removal squad, revealed
another view of Cleopatra—with staring eyes and anguished, tortured face. The
meaning of this reversal, according to the excellent catalogue essay of John T.
Spike, “must have been to suggest to the beholder that the opposite face of
mortal beauty is the danger of submitting to sensual pleasure and, ultimately,
destruction.” I love it when
Renaissance geniuses show their true medieval colors.

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About Me

John V. Fleming, the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of Literature emeritus at Princeton University, retired after a long teaching career in 2006. He and his wife Joan continue to live in Princeton. The Flemings have three adult children, six delightful grandchildren, and lives that mysteriously continue to be busy.
He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.